Obama and the Nuclear Conundrum

Obama and the Nuclear Conundrum
[The following essay was written last year, and may have been circulated in a sightly different form]

We are in a war of principles and ideas, and the means to communicate them, yet most of our leaders have no concept of what a principle or idea might be, and how to reconcile it either with personal ethics or public policy.  I wonder what Pres. Obama's teachers must be thinking.  Is he doing what they taught him, or is he "the bad boy" who is trying to make everyone look corrupt and stupid?

Is he a proud black American, or has he become the weak, fearful, slavish pawn of "the dark side" of town, or the universe?   What corporate gang bosses does he listen to, or does he think that he's actually the boss?  Is he afraid for his family and reputation?  He should be.  He is following policies and principles which will allow anyone, anywhere in the world, to wipe him out by contract or some other form of "remote control," since those are the policies and practices he is inflicting on others (targeted assassinations with no legal proceedings or basis in law).  As we used to say in the wild west, his life isn't worth a plugged nickle, and in the Nuclear Age, neither is the life of anyone else. 

For more than 3 decades, I've been saying that the primary focus of all political action has to be the elimination of nuclear weapons.  As long as we have this "Sword of Damocles" hanging over our heads by a thread, nothing else is worth doing or even thinking about.  We are all an hour away from complete annihilation - literally vaporization and irradiation to a level of death within a few week's time.  And here in Great Falls, we live, eat, sleep, and dream with the people who are poised to unleash this holocaust.  Yet, no more than a few dozen of our "heroic Montanans" have ever been willing to stand up and confront it.  Indeed, most of our appointed and elected officials are hell-bent on increasing the risks and even certainty that this will happen.   

President Obama spoke out forcefully for the abolition of nuclear weapons.  It was the one good reason people had to vote for him.  So, who does he appoint as his Secretary of Energy?  One of the foremost proponents of nuclear power, Mr. Chu (and this was a fact which was well-concealed in the confirmation process).  The same is true of the Pentagon.  What used to be a powerful faction there in favor of unilateral or universal nuclear disarmament, with the U.S. taking "the moral high ground" and leading this process, has been totally eliminated.  The Nuclear Doctrine reigns supreme, even extending to the further development and deployment of nuclear warheads to counter the various "new members of the club" - Israel, Pakistan, and India.  Besides those, there are dozens more countries with mature nuclear power reactor technologies and fuel cycles.  It's only a few month's work to re-process or enrich enough plutonium or uranium to make some Hiroshima-size nuclear weapons.  And there are still hundreds or thousands of Soviet-era nukes (as well as U.S. stockpiles overseas) which could be (or have been) stolen, diverted, or taken over by local forces and used in a matter of hours or days.  So, even if you have total faith in the U.S., Russian, British, French, and Chines governments and military command and control systems, you have not yet begun to understand or appreciate the gravity of the situation. 

In the early 1990's, local peace activists held a "Town Meeting" at the Providence Forum at UGF and invited all local political candidates to come and state their views.  That was where I first met Stuart Lewin, who gave a very strong and moving statement against our strategic nuclear arsenal, and the dangers it poses both to our local environment and economy, and to the world.  Peggy Beltrone, at the same event (it was her first run for County Commissioner) expressed her "support for the base" and maintained that it is a liberalizing and progressive influence on the City of Great Falls and Central Montana.  I doubt that she was, even then, an advocate for nuclear weapons or nuclear power generation (they are basically one and the same - you can't have one without at least the potenial for the other).  But no one runs for office here without paying lip service to all the "benefits" which our local nuclear arsenal provides to Montanans, if not the rest of the world. 

This is the reality we face - people hanging desperately on to a Doomsday Machine in the hopes of gaining wealth or other benefits from it.  And that is what must be changed.